GoKawiilGoogle's latest Android Show showed new Gemini features that, for the first time, have me excited about having AI on my phone -- and none of it involves generating soulless images or summarizing things (seriously, can we stop summarizing everything).
The new Android 17 features prioritize personalization and mindful design. They recognize that phone usage differs from person to person. That's why seeing Google show off features for speeding up a few useful things and prioritizing how I take breaks from my phone is great to see.
These three Android 17 features are my favorite announcements, and here's why I think they will transform how I use my Android phones.
Watch this: Android's Biggest AI Update: Everything to Know About Gemini Intelligence 03:26
1. Rambler for personalized speech-to-text
Speech-to-text has existed for several years, and the new Rambler feature uses AI to improve it. Instead of my having to tap the microphone and dictate verbatim what I want to say, the feature will use Gemini to take the important parts of what I'm saying to create a concise message. But that's not the best part; Google is using its lead in translation and language understanding to build this for multilingual people.
As someone who speaks English and Hindi in daily life, much of my personal communication is a mix of both languages. Rambler can seamlessly switch between languages within a single message, Google says. It uses Gemini's advanced multilingual model, which allows it to understand context and nuance. So, when you're blending two languages in speech (English and Hindi, in my case), it can easily convert your message to text in the way you intended.
The app Wispr Flow can do the same to some extent, too. But Google's version is more promising because it has all my data, which can be used for more personalized recommendations. Hopefully, that means it can create sentences that sound like how I speak and messages that remain natural and personal to me.
Personalization is important to me because I don't want to sound robotic in any of my written communication. I currently don't use AI speech-to-text services because I want my texts to continue to convey my personality. I hope that Rambler can keep the enthusiastic, excited, emotional and messiness of my texts. If it can, this might be the first speech-to-text feature I'd use in daily life.
Enlarge Image Rambler should make it easier to tell your phone what to write, since it will use AI to make a concise message. Google / Patrick Holland
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